In the decade or so that it had been since he'd last shot anybody, Eztli had almost forgotten the pure adrenaline rush and pleasure of violent action, of simple pure killing. He didn't realize how much he'd missed it, having to make do over the years with the vicarious thrills of gamecock or dog fighting. Now, the taste of blood still fresh in his mouth, it was as though he'd been sensation deprived, weaned slowly, methodically, and successfully off his drug and then reintroduced to its power and its beauty.
In ways he didn't try to understand, he knew that Ro was somehow the source of this drug. Before Ro had gotten out of jail, Eztli had been marking time, comfortable and secure, with the Curtlees. And then, suddenly Ro appeared at the home with his energy and fearlessness, and Eztli, riding around with him, catching the high-tension vibe of the younger man, had in the past days woken up from what felt like a long sleep. Ending in the climax of the gunshot to the man's head this afternoon. Ro, perhaps even unwittingly, had been the catalyst, the gateway to the drug.
And Eztli was going to protect that source.
Now at around nine o'clock, he was sitting in his car alone, parked across the street from Buena Vista Park in the Upper Haight. Wes Farrell lived in a medium-size Victorian home just down the block that Eztli and Ro had checked out-the address compliments of one of Denardi's private investigators-as one of Ro's first excursions after he'd gotten home. Farrell, Eztli knew, was going to be the key to whatever happened with Ro-and Farrell was weak and indecisive.
He could be controlled, and much more effectively than with Cliff and Theresa's carrot-and-stick, relatively subtle approach.
The trick, Eztli felt, was to see the man in his natural environment and determine where, when, and what kind of pressure to bring to bear on him to control his decision-making. What Eztli had said to Ro was true-Farrell was his best friend. It really wasn't in Ro's, or Eztli's, best interests to eliminate Farrell, to take him entirely out of the picture. No, Farrell needed to be part of any equation that could keep Ro permanently out of prison. He would be crucial to that.
Eztli simply had to make him understand the seriousness of the situation. So far, Farrell had mostly stood aside and let things happen, and the Curtlees' influence had carried the day. But eventually he was going to have to make a decision-to prosecute Ro or to let the matter drop. Eztli did not want him confused as to the proper choice.
So he had to get to know him a little more. See where the pressure points were. When Farrell dragged himself back into his home at nine thirty that Monday night, he could not ever remember being so tired. Somewhat to his surprise, the house was completely dark. Well, he wouldn't blame Sam if she had decided to go out to have dinner somewhere by herself or even with one of her friends. He'd been terrible company lately.
Tonight he hadn't called her to tell her he'd be late, hadn't even thought about it in the hurricane of emotion and upheaval that had swept through his office at the news that Matt Lewis had been found shot to death in his car out in the Fillmore district. Amanda Jenkins breaking down, inconsolably wedged between grief and guilt, John Strout, Treya, and Farrell himself administering to her while Glitsky and Becker headed out to the crime scene. Lapeer herself, the chief of police, had gone down to the magistrate on duty to try to get whoever it was to sign off on a search warrant for the Curtlee home, since no one had the tiniest doubt as to who was responsible for Lewis's death.
Farrell flicked on the light by the front door and in a second he heard the familiar click, click, click of Gert's nails on the hardwood floor as she came padding out of the kitchen to meet him. She'd probably been sleeping in her bed in there, and now he reached down and petted her. "Where's your mom?" he asked, putting down his briefcase, turning on more lights, heading for the refrigerator.
The answer came in the form of a note she left him on the kitchen counter:
"Wes-Sorry if this seems abrupt, but we both know I've been thinking about taking a little time off from us for a while now. You not calling or making it home tonight, after all of our discussions about just keeping on communicating with one another…
"Anyway, it was a wake-up call telling me that I should actually do something, rather than just taking things as they come and building up resentment against you. If I was choosing to stay around here and just keep taking it, whose fault is that? So I'm going to be staying over at Marianne's house for at least the next few days and I'd appreciate it if you'd leave me my space so I can think about what comes next for us. I don't know, maybe you won't want me back once you get used to me being gone, either. You've got to admit we haven't been having much fun lately. I'm not really much of a politician's wife, or even girlfriend, I'm afraid. I just don't seem to have much of a stomach for it. The compromises, the deals, Ro Curtlee, all of it.
"I do still love you-I do-and I'm fine. But I don't know if I can live anymore, or want to, the way we've been lately. Sam
"P.S. Gert has had dinner, but probably needs a walk before bed. If you want, you can leave her at the Center during the days, and I'll drop her back here at night, if you're going to be around. Just let me know."
Farrell let himself down on one of the kitchen chairs, laid the note on the table in front of him. Gert had put her head on his leg and he scratched the top of it absently.
After some time had gone by-he had no sense of how much-Gert started nudging his leg and whining. Moving like a zombie, Farrell put her leash on her and retraced his steps back to the front door, and then out into the night.
The street that his house was on mostly encircled the park, and he and Gert had a regular route they walked in the morning and before bed where she took care of her business. The park itself, now in the dark, was its usual open expanse of nothingness, and suddenly tonight, as he walked around its periphery, Farrell in his numbness gradually became aware of an ominous something that he couldn't quite put his finger on.
Stopping, he looked out into the park's center. Several of the lights in the street all around were out, and he couldn't for the life of him remember if they'd been working over the past few days. Ahead of him, there were no lights at all, either in the park or on the street. At the end of the leash, Gert started in with a high-pitched whining. Farrell walked on a few more steps, then stopped again.
He stood completely still for a minute or so. There was no sound at all in the street, not any movement that he could see. Finally he whispered down to his dog, "Come on, girl. Back we go."
But Gert, with hair standing up now down the center of her back, strained at her leash, growling low and harsh, and now barked at something out in the invisible distance.
Keeping a tight rein on her, Farrell moved up next to her head and petted it. "Come on now, come on." Pulling her around, heeling, back toward his house.
When they got back inside, he closed and locked the front door behind him. He took off Gert's leash and started to go back again into the kitchen. As a matter of course, whenever he did this, Gert would tag along next to him. But this time, she turned back to the front door and another low rumbling came out of her.
"Hey, easy now," he said. "It's okay. Everything's okay." But holding her by the collar, he opened the door again and took a quick look outside at his benign street upon which nothing moved.
After he finally got Gert calmed down, doing her business out the back stairs in their tiny backyard and then lying back down on her cushion in the kitchen, Farrell went over to the liquor cabinet and pulled down a bottle of Knob Creek bourbon. He free-poured himself most of a juice glass full, threw in enough ice cubes to take the liquid to the rim of the glass, then drank it all off in a gulp.
This-losing his woman and imagining threats on empty streets-was not by any stretch what he had bargained for when he'd run for DA. In his heart, he didn't really think that he was that serious a person. He had some verbal skills and he got along reasonably well with people from most walks of society, but he'd never considered himself to be a leader of men. He had originally been talked into running for DA with the thought that he'd bring a measure of enlightenment to the law enforcement community within the city. From his perspective as a lifetime defense attorney, he had believed that there was in fact often a problem with cops using more force than was justified. He thought that police often overstepped their mandates with immigrants as well as many of the other assorted minority populations in town. And by the same token, he'd represented a host of people who had made mistakes and, no question, were not angels-but through a mixture of glib humor and just the right amount of backbone, he had never felt in danger from most of these miscreants.
Well, there had been one. Mark Dooher had been Farrell's best friend for years. A fellow attorney, but inhabiting an entirely different stratosphere from Farrell's, Dooher had been counsel to the Archdiocese of San Francisco, among a host of other high-end clients. When Dooher's wife was killed in a home invasion, the overweening, overreacting police-Abe Glitsky, in point of fact-had launched what Wes took to be a vendetta against his friend, eventually bringing him to trial charged with his wife's murder. Farrell had taken on his defense, and in a brutal and grueling trial against Amanda Jenkins, had won an acquittal. That trial, moreover, marked the beginning of Farrell's rise to prominence in the city's legal community.
The only problem was that Mark Dooher-pillar of the community, wonderful father and husband, legal face of the Archdiocese-had, in fact, been guilty of killing his wife. And also guilty of raping a woman while he'd been in college. And killing another man with whom he'd been selling drugs in Vietnam. And gutting with a bayonet another young attorney with whom he'd been in litigation.
And then he had tried to kill Farrell, too.
Now, with Ro Curtlee, Wes felt that he was once again up against a true sociopath who might have given Mark Dooher a run for his money. He'd been out of prison for less than a month and he'd almost undoubtedly already killed three people, including Farrell's own investigator. And no one, apparently, seemed to be able to stop him. Vi Lapeer had volunteered to put a watch on him around the clock until the grand jury could issue an indictment against him, but she wouldn't have had time to do that yet today. Ro could be out there on Farrell's street right now, sitting in a car, lying in wait. He might break in here and light the place on fire.
One thing seemed certain-Ro was committed to staying out of jail. It seemed obvious to Farrell that he'd prefer to die resisting arrest-look how he'd fought with Glitsky and his two men-than go back to prison. So he wasn't afraid of anything. He would attack any and every person whom he wanted to punish or who threatened his freedom. Felicia Nunez, Janice Durbin, Matt Lewis. Gloria Gonzalvez, wherever she was. And to that list Farrell felt he could confidently add Amanda Jenkins, Glitsky, and his family.
And himself. Glitsky turned the keys-first the dead bolt, then the regular lock-in his front door as quietly as he could. It was sometime after midnight. Inside, he untied his shoes and slipped out of them, then picked them up and went around the corner to his small living room, where Treya stood up from where she was sitting on the couch and said, "Thank God you're home. If you could spare one, I could use a hug."
She stepped forward into his arms. Held him as tightly as she could. He dropped his shoes onto the floor and she felt something give in him and she reached up behind him and pulled his head down to the crook of her neck. He let his head rest where it was, heavy, and she could feel the thick, strong muscles in his neck letting go of the tension in them. After another moment, his arms came up around her, too, pressing her against him, so hard she almost, for a second, couldn't breathe.
She didn't care. This was all she wanted. If she couldn't catch a breath, she would do without it.
He exhaled completely, nuzzled his head into her neck and kissed it two, three times. Then straightened up. "You've been up all this time?"
"Apparently."
"How's Amanda?"
"As bad as you'd think. Maybe worse. She thinks it's her fault."
"It's not."
"No. I know that. It's going to take her a while, though. You want to sit?"
"I believe I could."
Treya sat back down where she'd been waiting on the couch and pulled the blanket she'd brought out of their bedroom up around her. Glitsky eased himself down sideways at the other end of the couch.
"You get anything?" she asked.
"Do you want to count getting rejected on the search warrant?"
"Even with the chief herself requesting it?'
"Even then. Same rules for the chief. You need probable cause."
"How about Matt Lewis was following him and Ro shot him?"
"How do we know Lewis was following him?"
"That was his assignment."
"How do we know he ever caught up with him?"
"Because we do. Didn't he call Amanda?"
"At lunchtime. This, the shooting, was at least an hour later, maybe more. Maybe in that time he lost them and went on to something else, and whatever that was got him killed."
"Does anybody really believe that?"
"No."
"And who's 'them' now?"
"Another guy was driving, not Ro. Matt Lewis didn't know him but told Amanda he looked more or less American Indian. They came out of the Curtlees' house together. I'm thinking it's the bodyguard I met the first time I went out there."
"So Matt Lewis followed them for an hour. Isn't that probable cause right there? They must know the chief isn't making this up."
"They might know it, but they're not signing the little piece of paper." Glitsky drew a hand down the side of his face as though he were wiping dirt off it. "A law enforcement officer, Matt Lewis, is shot execution-style in his car on a deserted street in a very bad part of town. Crawling with the drug trade. Fifty people within the sound of the shot could plausibly have done it. Why pick on Ro Curtlee?"
"Because we know he did it?"
"Well, one little bit of proof, and the judge signs off. But…" He shrugged.
"So who was the judge?"
"Chomorro."
Treya clucked disapproval. "So now there's three of them?"
"What do you mean?"
"Baretto, Donahoe, Chomorro. Doesn't anybody on the bench want to put this guy in jail?"
"Not more than they want to protect his civil rights." Glitsky went on, "Do you know what it takes to win a contested judicial race, Trey? A hundred and fifty grand walking away, two fifty if you want a landslide, and there's no limit on contributions to a judicial race. Slick, huh. Bottom line, the whole bench is terrified of the Curtlees."
"So who did his initial trial, again?"
"Thomasino."
"How about taking him your warrant to sign?"
Glitsky was shaking his head. "No. You want a warrant signed, you've got to go to the sitting magistrate, and this week it's Chomorro. Randomly. This, I need hardly tell you, ensures the impartiality of the law."
"I don't want impartial. Not in this case."
"Well," Glitsky said, "in fact, you do. But it wouldn't break my heart if we got lucky now and again."
Treya tightened the blanket around her shoulders. Sitting with her thoughts for a minute, she said in a small voice, "Do you think we need to be worried? Us, I mean."
Glitsky heaved a sigh and moved down the couch next to her. "I'd say I'm worried enough for all of us, but that's probably not what you want to hear." He took her hand in both of his. "I like to think he's made his point with us just to rattle my chain. Hurting you or the kids doesn't get him anything, and he knows I'd hunt him down and kill him. Coming after me or us doesn't help him with his retrial, either. So, logically I think he's probably done with us. I hope. Beyond which, the chief's putting on a few teams to follow him around the clock."
"You don't think he'll be able to shake them?"
"I don't know. I wouldn't rule it out."
Treya closed her eyes, took in a breath. "Well, be that as it may, after tonight… I mean, I've been thinking. I don't know if I can feel right leaving the kids with Rita anymore. Or at school. Even if you say there's no risk…"
"I'm not saying that."
"I know." She took another shaky breath. "This isn't like anything else, Abe. This is a truly crazy person."
After a moment, Glitsky nodded. "I can't argue with you. You're right. What do you want to do?"
"I think I want to go away for a while. All of us. Until this blows over somehow."
Glitsky's nostrils flared and his mouth went tight, the scar going white through his lips. "I can't do that, Trey. Not in the middle of this."
"Why not?"
"Well, if for no other reason, that's telling Ro he wins."
"So what if he wins?" Treya's voice took on an edge. "It's not you against him."
"I'm not so sure about that."
"Well, then, all the more reason." She brought her hands together over his. "If it's that personal, then you really are in danger. Don't you see that?"
"I do, okay. But I can't run just because some psychopath is out to get me. There are protections in place and there's no reason to think they're not going to work."
"There isn't? Tell that to Mr. Lewis."
But Glitsky shook his head. "I don't really think he can touch me or you or the kids. Or that he has any reason to."
"And you're willing to bet all of our lives, or any of our lives, on that?"
"Trey," he said. "That might be a little dramatic, don't you think?"
She let go of his hands, and now very suddenly Glitsky realized that she'd quickly worked herself into a cold and unaccustomed fury. "I'm willing to take grief for being dramatic when our children's lives have been threatened, Abe. And in fact I'm kind of outraged you're not taking it a lot more seriously."
"I am."
"No, you're not. You're thinking of all this in terms of your job, of you versus Ro Curtlee, and who's going to win, and you're willing to risk losing all of this, our home"-she gestured at the room around them-"losing Rachel or Zack or you and me…"
"We're not going to…"
Now, tears of anger and frustration in her eyes, Treya slammed both fists into her lap. "We will if one of us is dead, Abe! Don't you see that? How close does it have to get? Just like poor Matt Lewis, all the sudden, poof, gone forever. And never even saw it coming."
"Hey." Reaching out, he touched her shoulder. "Treya…"
Brushing his hand off, she turned on him. "Don't touch me! I'm not being hysterical or dramatic. I don't need to get calmed down. You're talking logic, but don't you see that that man can take all this away, on a whim, everything we've ever built together and care about? And you're willing to risk that? Why? Because of your job? Your career in law enforcement? I can't even believe we're having this discussion."
"I told you I don't think the likelihood…"
"Fuck likelihood, Abe! Fuck that!"
The profanity hit Glitsky with a titanic force, snapping his head back. She knew that he had a visceral intolerance for that kind of language, and in all the time they'd been together, she'd never said anything like that around him. He ran his hand over his forehead-his blood was rushing to his head, his stomach roiling-and he stood up and walked over to the front windows, trying to grab a breath.
"I didn't mean-" he finally got out. "Whatever I said, I didn't mean it. Of course you can go. Of course, no risk is tolerable. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to criticize you. You are completely right. If you need to go, you need to go. The children need to go."
"And what about you?"
He turned back to face her, met her eyes, waited, shook his head no.
"How is this possible?" she asked. "How can we have come this far and I don't even know you?"
"Trey," he began, "you know me. You know who I am. I've been a cop ever since…"
She held up a hand, stopping him. "Oh, spare me," she said. "Spare me, please." And standing up, she gathered the blanket around her and spun on her heel around the corner and back to their bedroom, closing the door hard behind her.